


we don't have too much time here

by CallMeBombshell



Category: Captain America (Comics), Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Captain America: The Winter Soldier, F/M, Gen, Implied Relationships, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-25
Updated: 2013-10-25
Packaged: 2017-12-30 10:26:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1017488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CallMeBombshell/pseuds/CallMeBombshell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She is sixteen and beautiful, red hair and green eyes and smooth skin, slender hips and graceful shoulders, long fingers and a smile that could cut glass.</p>
<p>He is twenty-six and tiny, lost in his baggy trousers and the shirts that drape from his thin shoulders, blue eyes bright with fervor and fever in equal measures as winter moves in.</p>
<p>He is thirteen and angry, sharp grin like broken glass and eyes flashing like firecrackers, fists held loose and open until he needs them, until he needs to lash out, quick, hard strikes, and the other boys have learned by now not to mess with him. </p>
<p>He is ageless and aching, his back against a cold metal tabletop and people standing all around him, and he doesn't know how he got here or where he is, but there is something in the back of his mind telling him it doesn't matter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we don't have too much time here

**Author's Note:**

  * For [defcontwo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/defcontwo/gifts).



She is sixteen and beautiful, red hair and green eyes and smooth skin, slender hips and graceful shoulders, long fingers and a smile that could cut glass.

She is sixteen and a dancer, prima ballerina of the Russian National Ballet Corps. and she’s been invited here to mingle with the high and mighty, to swap stories with the rich and famous, to rub elbows with the powerful and influential.

She is sixteen and working, long, high-heeled steps sweeping her around between people in a carefully calculated pattern and she circles the room, her sharp ears catching murmurs and exclamations and whispered bits of gossip. She’s making her way, slowly, towards the man in the center of the room, the man holding court in a small crowd of younger men and beautiful women. He’s a general, and he knows things she needs to know.

She is sixteen and better-trained than any soldier in the Russian Army, better trained than any of the spies and agents and assassins that have come after her time and time again. Her teacher is a man with no name and no past, voice low and dark and eyes that are dead and dull until he sees her. He teaches her hand-to-hand until she can disarm or kill a man in the time it takes to blink. He teaches her weapons, guns and knives and explosives, teaches her to make a mess and to leave no trace, teaches her to make a statement out of both.

_(he teaches her other things, as well, things that remain between the two of them and never leave their darkened rooms; he never speaks of it, and she takes his lead)_

This is not her first mission

_(there was a room and a woman who stood too tall and too firm and would not yield and it had been messy and she does not speak of it)_

but it is her first mission alone. She is not afraid. She is not worried. She is is trained for this.

She is sixteen and deadly, and she knows what she is. She is the only one of her kind, the only woman in the world who can do what she does, what she has always done. She has never known anything different.

She is sixteen and a weapon.

  
  
  
  
  


He is twenty-six and tiny, lost in his baggy trousers and the shirts that drape from his thin shoulders, blue eyes bright with fervor and fever in equal measures as winter moves in.

He is twenty-six and an artist, graphite smudged across his fingers and leaving dusty grey smudges at the edges of the paper he’s using. He’s drawing cartoons, political and funny and worth a lot more than he’s being paid, nowhere near enough to cover his rent for the month, but it’s better than nothing at all.

He is twenty-six and scrawny, too-small fists and a too-big heart, and the blood on his knuckles is always his, wiped from beneath his nose and his split lip. He is standing in an alley, his way blocked by another boy, taller and more solid, but his fists are raised and his teeth clenched and he isn’t backing down.

He is twenty-six and desperate to go to war, despite the illness and the asthma and the weakness of his limbs, because the world is at war and every man is needed, even pathetic little things like him. This is his only chance, his only shot at proving to the world that he is worth something, and he is going to take it if it kills him.

He is twenty-six and giant, feeling lost in his own skin, the new width of his shoulders and the way his chest expands when he breathes. He spends an hour teaching his new hands to hold a pencil without breaking it, smearing graphite across his palms as he does. His fingers seem too large, now, his palms too square, his fists too powerful

_(he worries, for a moment, that these new hands don’t know how to hold anything but a gun; he is relieved to find that he is wrong)_

and he has spent his whole life throwing himself forward but now he has to teach himself to hold back.

He is twenty-six and a captain, five men at his back and his lieutenant at his side, and nothing can stop them. They sweep through Europe, through France and Italy and Germany, leaving a trail of broken enemy bodies behind them, all objectives accomplished, all men accounted for. They sing in bombed-out bars, huddle around fires in silent woods, grin and laugh over the ring and blaze of gunfire. The man at his side smirks at him as he shoots, one two three down. It makes something erupt in his chest, and he has never felt so alive.

_(in the quiet moment, he traces the lines of his lieutenant’s face, watches the way his hands move, and ignores the way his heart skips a beat)_

He is twenty-six and screaming, tears across his face freezing with the wind and his hand is reaching and empty, and he has never felt so broken. Days later, he turns a plane towards the snow and ice and says he’s sorry, but there is a hollow place in his chest that thinks he’s almost glad.

He is twenty-six and he sleeps.

  
  
  
  
  


He is thirteen and angry, sharp grin like broken glass and eyes flashing like firecrackers, fists held loose and open until he needs them, until he needs to lash out, quick, hard strikes, and the other boys have learned by now not to mess with him.

He is eighteen and laughing, the boy at his side smiling up at him like sunshine, and he has never had a friend, not really, but already he thinks that he will never need another so long as he has this. He forgets, sometimes, that there was ever a time before this, before this boy, forgets that there was ever a time when he was alone. He thinks he would move mountains for this boy beside him, frail and tired and so fucking bright it hurts his eyes sometimes.

_(there are girls, sometimes, who he takes to dinners or to shows and sometimes to his bed, and if often they are thin and blonde with blue eyes and long fingers, well, that’s just something he tries not to think about)_

He is twenty-seven and drafted, the card come in the mail, white paper and black ink and so innocuous, so innocent, like there isn’t blood rushing in his ears, like his hands aren’t shaking, like his mouth isn’t dry. Like the world isn’t ending, quiet and private like a sigh. Blue eyes watch him from across the room. Neither of them says anything; they don’t need to.

He is twenty-eight and captured, two bullets in his side and another in his arm, bag thrown over his head and he’s thrown into a truck. He loses consciousness before he can tell them to fuck off.

_(he wakes up and doesn’t realize, can’t see through the colors swirling around him, red and black and sickly purple, can’t think through the haze and the fire in his bones, in his blood, the pain of it searing across his eyes and he’s blind, he’s blind, he can’t see, he can’t think and he’s screaming but he can’t hear his own voice)_

He is twenty-eight and awestruck, staring at this stranger with such a familiar face, and there are colors still sparking at the corners of his vision but he’d know those blue eyes anywhere.

He is twenty-eight and a soldier, a lieutenant at his captain’s side, and when he said he would move mountains for this man, he didn’t think he meant it literally, but, well. He is a shadow at his captain’s side, still following after like he’d followed him down dirty alleys in Brooklyn, still looking for a fight after all these years. He fingers the trigger of his gun, puts a round through an enemy’s skull before the enemy can put one through his captain’s, and grins like lightning as he does.

He is twenty-eight and there is wind screaming in his ears, drowning out his voice, and he is scrabbling, his grip failing, his arm stretched out and reaching but it’s not enough, it’s not enough, and there is a shriek of metal and he heart stops.

He is twenty-eight and he is falling.

  
  
  
  
  


He is ageless and aching, his back against a cold metal tabletop and people standing all around him, and he doesn’t know how he got here or where he is, but there is something in the back of his mind telling him it doesn’t matter. He feels strangely lopsided, off-balance even though he’s lying down. There is a sudden coldness down his left side and he turns his head. His left arm is made of metal, gleaming and silver and dangerous. It feels foreign. It feels like part of him.

He is ageless and freezing, crouched on a rooftop across a broad paved square from a man who is about to die. His training tells him to ignore the cold, but his body cannot help but feel it. The wind is biting and wet, whipping sleet into his face to soak the collar of his heavy coat. The rifle in his hands is cold, metal leeching the heat from his gloved right hand. His left hand feels nothing.

He is ageless and an instructor, a teacher, a mentor. She is graceful and sharp and her hair burns like fire in the light. Her green eyes are dark and unreadable until they catch on his. He thinks, once, that they are the wrong color. She flies at him, catches him in his weak places as he waits for the right moment to strike. When they hit the mat, she gasps, and he feels the breath leave his body in a rush.

_(he takes a moment too long to stand again, his hands lingering too long at her hips. their observers never notice; she does. she smiles, and lets him linger)_

He is ageless and tired, his bones feeling worn and weary in a way that he cannot explain. It makes him uncomfortable, so he hides it from his handlers. There is an itch just under his skin, some days, a restlessness that he cannot settle, some strange impulse in these American streets that forces his steps from their path. There is something more here, something he is meant to find, someone he is trying to find.

He is ageless and forgetting. The ice creeps into his brain and settles in his memories, inching cold and unbroken over faces and voices and names until he forgets that they ever existed. There is ice in his veins, spiking and painful, wrapped like barbed wire around his muscles and he can’t move. The ice covers his eyes, crawls down his throat, freezes him from the inside out. He sleeps.

He is ageless and awoken. He has no name, no past, no memories. He knows nothing except his training, motions and skills and motives that he could practice in his sleep. He knows nothing except that there is a target, and that his job is to take him out. He stares at the man across the street, flames blurring his vision, but he can make out blond hair and blue eyes. His heart stutters, strangely, but his steps don’t falter.

He is ageless and aiming, blue eyes caught on his and he can’t look away. There is ice in his brain, creeping across his memories, but it is thawing, dripping through his thoughts and leaving shivering trails down his spine, and those blue eyes won’t look away. They are familiar, somehow.

_(blue eyes and thin shoulders grown wide, artist’s hands wrapped around a gun, a target painted on a man’s back and his eyes to guard it and he would give his life for this man in a heartbeat)_

He is twenty-nine or ninety-nine, he doesn’t know, doesn’t know what’s happened to him. There is a roaring in his head, black and red and purple and through it all a streak of blue, and it is painful, light and sound and so many memories that don’t makes sense. He doesn’t feel his knees hit the ground, doesn’t feel the gravel sharp in the palm in his right hand. His breath feels like needles in his lungs as he gasps, but even as he knows he’s screaming, the sound in his head seems to lessen. There is red flickering at the corner of his eye, flame-bright and familiar, somehow. He looks up through the haze around his vision and there are blue eyes staring back at him.

He is twenty-nine and he remembers.

  
  
  
  
  


She is eighty-five and looks twenty-eight, and she is staring at a man she has not seen in fifty years, but he looks the same as she remembers. His hair in longer, his arm is different, less monstrous and more human, for all that it’s still made of metal. His eyes are dark and dead and dull until he looks at her. There is a spark in his vision, quickly swallowed by confusion, and she can’t help that she cries out, short and sharp, as he falls to his knees.

_(she remembers a train station in america, remembers the ticket in her pocket and that he’d never come. instead, there was a black man in a long coat, a patch over one eye; she went with him instead)_

  
  
  
  
  


He is twenty-seven and awake, surrounded by a world he’s still fighting to understand, history and culture and language lost to him, but there is a man standing before him who he lost long before all this existed. Dark eyes find his and refuse to look away, and he feels the breath seize in his lungs, his blood rushing in his ears as everything fades away. He is aware only of the man before him, dark hair and familiar face, and his lungs are screaming with the need to say his name. He wants to wrap his arms around him, wants to bury his face in this man’s neck. He wants to grip him tight and never let him go.

_(he wants to promise that he will be there to catch him; he wants to promise that he will never fall again)_

  
  
  
  
  


He is twenty-nine and all the pieces are falling into place, the memories shifting themselves around in his head, the gaping chasm between who he thought he was and who he was at the start like a screaming wound inside his head, but none of that matters right now. Because there is a woman standing across from him with red hair and green eyes, and a man with blond hair and blue eyes beside her, and they are staring at him like they can’t believe that he is real.

_(he can’t believe that they are real, can’t believe it when they are suddenly at his side, their arms wrapped around him and tears in their eyes. their hands never leave him, and he has never felt so warm)_

  
  
  
  
  


They are twenty-something and out of their time, displaced and confused and so, so lost. They don’t care. They have time again to make it right again. They have all the time they need.


End file.
